#BringBackOurGirls can’t overcome Nigeria graft

A U.S. State Department official said corruption is hurting Nigeria’s efforts to end the insurgency in the north east that’s now destabilizing the entire country.

Sarah Sewall, left, the Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week that security forces “must overcome entrenched corruption and incompetence for it to rescue the over 200 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram on April 14,” a report by Punch said.

Nigeria budgeted $5.8 billion for security for 2014, Sewall said.

But “corruption prevents supplies as basic as bullets and transport vehicles from reaching the front lines of the struggle against Boko Haram.”

Police corruption is one of the country’s biggest problems. A report by Human Rights Watch detailed institutionalized graft at every level of the country’s law enforcement and criminal justice system.

The 2010 report said “high-level police officials embezzle staggering sums of public funds meant to cover basic police operations. Senior police officers also enforce a perverse system of ‘returns’ in which rank-and-file officers are compelled to pay up the chain of command a share of the money they extort from the public.”

At the House Committee hearing last week, Sewal said desertions were common among underpaid and poorly equipped soldiers in the 7th Army Division that was sent to fight the insurgents.

At a security summit hosted by French President Francois Hollande in Paris Saturday, Nigeria President Goodluck Jonathan called Boko Haram the “al Qaeda of West Africa.”

At the U.S. hearings last week, Committee chair Ed Royce (R-CA) said being trained by al Qaeda “meant greater terror for Nigerians, and greater challenges for the security forces.”

Around 80 U.S. troops are reported to be in Chad to support the effort to rescue the abducted schoolgirls.

The troops are mainly from Air Force crews who operate “unarmed Predator surveillance drones,” Punch said.

___________

Richard L. Cassin is the Publisher and Editor of the FCPA Blog. He can be contacted here.

Founder of the FCPA Blog and Editor at Large. He has been named multiple times as one of the 100 Most Influential People In Business Ethics by Ethisphere Magazine and is a Trust Across America Top Thought Leader. He’s a member of the DC, Virginia, and Florida bars. His At Large column is a regular feature of the FCPA Blog.

Legal

Quick Links

About

We set out in 2007 to bring our readers free and unrestricted coverage of all Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions — the first to do that in real-time.

Since then we’ve published more than 7,500 posts by 600 different authors.

Our mission is to help compliance professionals and others everywhere understand how corruption happens, what it does to people and institutions, and how anti-corruption laws and compliance programs work.